


forget my name, forget this place

by macabre



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Dark, Kidnapping, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Revenge, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-01
Updated: 2012-12-01
Packaged: 2017-11-19 23:52:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/579000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabre/pseuds/macabre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The cracks aren’t bloody, the cracks are skin and everything else is blood – and he thinks for a moment Q is smiling. He’s not smiling. His lips are just unrecognizable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	forget my name, forget this place

It’s only for the places like MI6 that they have doctors like these, a place like this. It’s not even below ground like headquarters is now, but it’s worse. At first glance the overwhelming amount of panoramic windows placed on the ground floor inside the building, and the gorgeous gardens with stone benches outside it, give one the sense that there couldn’t be a more beautiful place in all of Britain, and no one from the outside would ever know any different, because there are no casual visitors to this house. Only the most strictly authorized ones come here. 

Bond fights for weeks to be let in. Too fragile is their reply; he’s a trigger that need not be pulled in this situation. He hears what others have to say about him; the ones who don’t know he’s listening in say words like comatose, irreversible, gone. The ones who talk to him directly about the situation have even less to say.

“I’m sorry,” Eve says quietly. No one will ever talk about Q again in anything other than a quiet tone. 

“Will they let you see him?” He asks, but he knows the answer already.

She hesitates to answer, won’t look at him. She never used to be afraid to look him in the eye and tell him the hard things. “Yes. In time.” 

“Will you?”

She never answers. Bond leaves after the slightest moment of hesitation. They send him to Laos next, but it’s not Moneypenny who collects him to see M, it’s Tanner.

“Anything to keep me busy,” he says as they climb the stairs to M’s office. Tanner at least looks him in the eye.

On the plane, Bond never looks over the file. He goes into the country and apprehends the people responsible for a disturbance in Thailand two months ago – and all Bond thinks is that two months ago everything was different.

He kills all of them. When asked, he’ll say he had no choice. Most of them mean nothing to MI6, but perhaps they wanted the leader to interrogate. Bond doesn’t give him to them. Instead, he takes a few nails and a hammer and practices his swing.

Instead of heading back to London, they send him straight to Hong Kong, no questions asked about the state of the Laos men. His job there calls for even less discretion than the one before, so he takes his time hunting the men, or in this case, the woman behind a trafficking operation. He shows her no difference in his treatment. 

Another mission in Bhutan. They send him another after that in Burma. He takes the next flight back to London instead. He figures they know by the time he lands that he has declined. He drives straight to the little stone house in the country, the same one guarded constantly by men inside and outside the matching stone wall. Once past the men, there isn’t much security inside the house, just cameras, and those are easily dealt with. 

It’s late night, early morning. People should be sleeping, but here people won’t be controlled. He hears a television quietly playing in one room, hears someone listening to music in a separate soon, and whispers everywhere. The inconsolable, and the ones consoling. The halls are well staffed, so it’s difficult getting upstairs. The floors creak horribly and there’s an oval stained glass window with flowers in it that’s hideous right at the top of them. 

There’s only four rooms upstairs. It’s the last on the left, he knows. He knows and he stands there with his hand on the doorknob, and it’s not the feeble lock that keeps him out. He stands there, hand on the door, and can’t move for a long moment, but time is ticking, and someone will be coming soon to check all the rooms. 

So when Bond shifts to pick the lock on autopilot, he’s not sure if he means the door to crack open. He stands there, completely frozen, but eyes already adjusting to the dark inside the room. There is no window inside the room, as if the massive windows downstairs make up for it. Here there is only the dark, and smooth walls, a plastic bed frame and soft sheets. 

And a mop of dark hair on a starkly white pillow, unrulier than ever before. A back turned to him so all he has are the sharp angles of bone jutting into clothing. Sheets twisted around a waist finitely thin. All this, and even breathing. 

If he strains his ears, he can hear it. The inhale and exhale. It’s almost nonexistent.

But Bond knows about that too – that in captivity, you learn to breath as if you were dead, which is to say, so quietly and so shallowly you might as well not breath at all. 

There is nothing else. He stands there for some time, watching, waiting for his presence to be known. That’s how you survive being taken – you learn to be conscious always of the others, when they’re in the room with you or not. But there’s no acknowledgement. No movement at all, as if Q really were just exhausted and came here for a good rest.

He tries to stop his feet, but they move unaccounted for around the bed. Very slowly, very softly, and as the corner of his face – his ears, his chin and neck – come into view, Bond hears the creaking stairs. 

He stops where he can just barely make out the tip of his crooked nose, broken and never allowed to heal, and the twisted lips, carved into with some kind of knife, nothing too sharp, and his eyelashes, thinner, almost absent. 

He leaves the room and the house altogether right after he sees the open eyes, open for seeing and not seeing.

Q never moves a muscle the entire time. 

 

 

 

Every return to MI6 is a quiet one; people used to fall silent around him because he was one of those agents – the ones always dying and somehow always surviving. Maybe it was awe then, or respect. It certainly isn’t now. The men and women behind their desks watch him enter out of the corner of their eyes, the low whispers of the place choked off. No one says anything like, aren’t you supposed to be in Burma? By now they’ve sent someone else in his place. By now, they’re erasing his files one by one. 

They’ll say it’s his age, or his reckless behavior. They won’t call it what it really is. MI6 holds no room for sentimentality, and Bond wouldn’t have it any other way, not even now, as he stands on the edge by himself. He’s almost surprised they give him authorized access to everything in headquarters still; he understands that he’ll always have access to some parts of it, because that way they’ll always have access to him. 

There are few people who will deal with him now; Tanner is becoming less and less one of those people, Eve too, although she can’t always help it, because the one person who will always have to deal with him until he dies too is M. Bond will never escape her sympathetic silence or Tanner’s disapproving eyes, and he especially won’t escape the one-sided conversations with M. 

“You went to see him last night.”

Bond doesn’t deny it. He can’t and won’t. What he wants to say is yes, I saw him, but he didn’t see me, and he never will. Trying to deny him the right to visit him is useless. Q won’t ever know the difference whether he does or not. 

“You know the best chance of recovery he has is to be away from anything that might cause him to sink further into himself. One day he might wake up and see you there. What do you think that would do to him?”

Bond is silent for a while longer. This isn’t an official meeting, of course. Bond’s not sure if he’ll ever have another official meeting with M again, so the other man does paperwork while the agent sits in front of him. 

“You know what I did to that man?” Bond finally asks. 

M’s hand stops writing whatever it is, but he doesn’t look up. Of course he doesn’t know. Bond buried him where he’ll never be found, and it was a greater honor than he deserved. After all, he doesn’t bury the men he kills.

“I couldn’t let a doppelganger go around getting people confused anymore, could I? I took a scalpel and surgically alternated his face, just a little bit, no need to overdo it.” 

The man looked like him in the way one has to double take before familiarity sinks down in your stomach and you know it’s not the one you think it is. Unfortunately, Q’s eyesight was never corrected like it was supposed to be, so when they took his glasses, and days stopped turning into days but just one day, he somewhere along the way forgot a truth he once knew about a man he couldn’t clearly recognize anymore. 

“Then I turned him loose, just for a little while, to give him hope, and let the children see his awful face and become frightened. Then I took him to a warehouse were I could heat up some metal, just enough for it to be pliable, and I cast that face so it couldn’t be forgotten.”

His mouth was the worst – the man wouldn’t stop screaming, and the metal didn’t cool fast enough to form any proper shape of it. The metal mask ended up more horrid than the face itself. 

“You are relieved of active duty, 007.”

 

 

Once upon a time, a longer time ago in memory rather than actual years, Bond thought he might be one of the lucky agents to have it all – not just the career, but the wife and kids too. At the very start of his career, before he was promoted, before he had killed more people than he could remember, he had worried that he might find someone to love and martyr them into a widow. 

He never thought he’d be the widow, but most don’t, he supposes.

There’s nowhere else to go – no missions or offices to visit, and no other friends to visit. Just their flat. It’s been several weeks since anyone’s come or gone, and already everything is covered in that fine layer of dust like a mausoleum. There’s nothing extremely homey about the place – no pictures on the walls, no anything on the wall, not even a knock-off painting. All of Q’s equipment is gone now, probably the last time this place was visited was to collect it, and that was all of his personal touch. Wires and hard drives and desktop screens. All gone.

Bond had even less personal touch in the space. Looking at it now, he thinks it could be a staple flat anywhere in London, the kind realtors show to couples in poor example of what the place would look like with some love. There are clothes still in the drawers and closet, and colognes and shaving kits in the bath. The sheets on the bed haven’t been changed, and there’s a trail of tissues across it.

“This is all very embarrassing,” Q says, flat on his back in bed. Bond could hear his labored breathing from the door. He stands in their doorway, arms crossed, but smug expression.

“I heard they publically banned you from headquarters when they found green snot on the keyboards.” 

A groan and the sheets rustle, a hand twisting them up higher until they rest right under his chin. There’s a laptop in sight on their bedside table, but the fact it’s sleeping and not on the bed tells Bond enough. He removes his coat, tie, shoes, then tugs at the blankets.

“I’ll get you sick,” Q says, bleary eyes and red nose. He peeks up at him, refusing to give any slack on the sheets. 

“I’ll be fine.” He tugs at the blankets until Q sighs and lets them go. Crawling into bed, before he’s even settled Q has turned and collapsed on top of him, his skin already too warm for comfort.

“How was Moscow?” 

“Boring.” He smiles into the head that pushes itself under his chin, wet breathe gasping against his neck. He glances to the side, looking for the telltale mug. “Do you need anything?”

“No.” Q sounds miserable, and whatever he has, it must be more than a cold or the flu. Possibly something that he will regret cuddling with later, but for now Bond tightens his grip around Q’s hips and lets Q dig his fingers into his chest. He’s clearly not going anywhere. 

“How long have you been ill?” He’s just within reach of their alarm clock – he unplugs it. 

“Few days.” 

“Right.” The curtains are already drawn, and the lights off. In the dark, there’s nothing but pale skin peeking out from under one of his shirts. Bond rubs his fingers along his neck, right under the collar. 

“I own more comfortable things you could be wearing,” he says. He knows why Q chose this one – it’s one of the last things he wore before he left, and therefore the one that was sitting in the pile for the wash with his aftershave on it.

Q just grunts, breathing still heavy. Difficult to sleep breathing like that, Bond knows. He also suspects that there’s going to be green snot all over his shirt. 

“Thank you for coming straight here.”

“Where else would I go?” He never got a new flat. 

“I don’t know,” Q sighs. “Hide out at MI6 for awhile, I guess.”

“In sickness and in health.” It’s just a suggestion, the same as the skimming fingers under his shirt, but Q pauses, the room quiet in the absence of his rattled breathing. 

“Are you moving in the last of your things?” 

“The car’s already parked in the garage across the street.” 

The hands trying to crawl under his skin relent at the same time the noisy breathing resumes. Q pulls his hands out from under Bond’s shirt and folds them on top of his chest, tipping his chin there so he can look up at him. 

“There are certain things we never say,” he reminds him quietly, closing his eyes and leaning into his hands. 

“There are certain things we don’t need to say.”

The memory already fades; Bond remembers running his hands through Q’s hair until he fell into a sleep noisier than his waking state. He remembers catching whatever it was Q had right after he began feeling better, and subsequently staring up at Q working in bed next to him because he didn’t feel like sitting up for days at a time. He’d sleep, or not sleep, with his nose stuck to Q’s hip and it was the most comfortable he’d ever been.

Bond doesn’t clean the bed. He takes the bags out of the closest and starts packing his things. 

 

 

His name isn’t on an approved list, but no one stops Bond from visiting Q this time when he goes during daylight hours. The doctors there are trained to work with malfunctioning agents, not functioning ones. They look at him with something close to fear, which Bond finds nothing but amusing. 

Patients come and go at this house; this is the temporary location, and if the situations turn out not to be temporary, they send them to a larger facility somewhere Bond doesn’t even know. There are just three patients currently, Q included, and there are five people on staff. Everyone’s eyes are on him, including a field agent he was vaguely familiar with. His head is shaved so that when he turns his head, Bond sees the long scar that wraps around one side of his skull. It’s still violently red, so it’s either still relatively recent, or he’s had surgery within the past few months. The other patient Bond has no idea who she is – but she’s the vocal one. The one who yells, and not antagonistic things, she just seems to like to yell, as if she can prove she’s still there by yelling. 

And then there’s Q, who sits silently every day until someone maneuvers him into another room or another place. The doctors tell him about their sessions with him; how he doesn’t respond to anything, but physically he’s recovered well. His scars fade from angry red into nearly maroon, and his breathing doesn’t falter when they massage his chest where his ribs were fractured. He can stand on his own when pushed into position, and some days he’ll walk on his own when led. There’s a heavy limp, but his right leg can hold his weight now. They’re not entirely sure about the use of his hands – he won’t grip things enough to actually hold anything on his own, but the crooked state of his fingers tell Bond everything. They could hold large items if they wanted to, but they’ll never be flexible enough to write or type or move individually again.

It is moments like that when Bond hopes Q never comes back to reality. The thing is, Bond’s not sure where he is. Is he stuck inside his own head? Retreated there and never came back? Is he with them now, perfectly conscious but can’t tell them so? Stuck physically but not mentally? The truth is, Q could be anywhere. Bond would rather it’s with him, but he’s forgiven Q already. 

It’s a sunny day, the first of that spring, when Bond drives up to the cottage and parks his car. Steps out and heads straight to the garden because they pretend Q has a preference to sit there. They dress him like they think he might have dressed himself – in baggy cardigans and wrinkled pants, but there’s not a single item of Bond’s on him. Not a watch or button-up under that sweater.

They sit across from each other by the little fountain the garden boasts; sunny and fair weathered and everything they’re not. There’s a blanket thrown over Q, some hideous thing he would have hated. Bond rubs a finger along its coarse warmth and pretends to lean in close to inspect it. He inhales deeply a scent entirely new to him – it’s sterile and generic soap. Q no longer smells like him. 

He covers Q’s hands under the blanket so he can’t see them. He wishes he could stare at any part of his body and pretend Q is whole and well, but there’s hardly an inch of him that isn’t marked. 

He stares everywhere. There is nothing else left. 

They used to do this; sit in silence for hours at a time. Nothing to be said, because they didn’t need it to be said. It’s different now of course, but he could pretend if he closed his eyes, if he let that knobby hand slide out of his, but keep his body pressed up to his side. 

“I love you. You always knew, didn’t you?” 

Q knew. He must have. 

He can’t help himself when he lingers on just one finger. 

 

 

There is another old house, far away from the stone cottage, where Bond hangs their things in a dustier closest. Less suits and more cardigans and soft things. There are real windows in every room, and a massive, antique bathtub big enough for two. 

It’s the kind of house that Q would have hated. He loved his modern apartment, all steel and black and white, in the center of London. Old homes that required work was never something that interested him, but Bond needs something to do, so he fixes things up, makes sure the water actually runs hot enough and stashes weapons in the floorboards. He leaves the old wisteria tree that’s morphed into the side of the house – of all the needy things there, he thinks Q would have liked that one. 

There, he thinks. A rocking chair for when Q feels well enough to push himself. A throne on dusty floors and a cobweb crown. 

Q deserves more. That thought can’t even be completed, because if he deserves a better house, then he certainly deserves a better life, a better career, one that doesn’t put him in danger. He deserves hands that work, feet that walk on their own account, and breathing lungs that don’t hurt. 

He deserves someone who could –

 

 

He needs to see but doesn’t want to look; it’s not a room, it’s a closet, and the one luxury it has is a light bulb that is nothing but flickering and blood splattered. Everything is red to begin with, and when Bond looks down at the crumpled body on the floor, he can’t even tell that Q is painted in it.

Drop to a knee. Yell for back-up, for medics, for any kind of saving grace. He’s too afraid to touch him – injuries seen and unseen. Q’s face is unknown to him, his head hanging off his neck, turned down to the floor. 

His hands are safe nowhere, but he tilts Q’s chin so gently, just to see his face – and the cracks aren’t bloody, the cracks are skin and everything else is blood – and he thinks for a moment Q is smiling. He’s not smiling. His lips are just unrecognizable. 

“Oh my God.” He realizes his fingers are slipping into the flesh more than they should, and he should let go, but he doesn’t. “Q! Q! Someone get a stretcher now! Someone – “ 

When he turns back to the face, the eyes are open. Unfocused, and nothing can reach them. Until he kisses those ruined lips. He pulls away and the eyes are on him, tracing his nose and mouth and then he’s gone.

Inhuman. Just screaming. For a moment, Bond thinks they’ve ripped out his tongue too – it just doesn’t sound like anything he’s heard before. 

“It’s alright, it’s alright!” He moves his hands to Q’s shoulders, feels the bones grinding to dust under his fingernails. 

There is no end to the screaming. There is another field agent sweeping the building, and there’s Eve running up behind him yelling, but he can’t hear her. Bond is frozen on the floor, knee in dried blood. 

There’s a hand on his shoulder and he’s tearing around, knife in hand. He gets Eve through the clavicle, missing her heart by inches. She gets a foot under him before he can do anything else.

“They had someone with your face torturing him,” she pants, one hand pressed to his chest with just a gun between them, the other squeezing her wound. “You need to step away now.”

They stare at each other, all that screaming still behind them, and Q’s trying to crawl back into the closet, the wood concave from where he’s scratched into it over time. He’s not moving his legs at all, just grabbing by the broken fingers. 

Bond chokes, twisting around so he won’t have to see it for a moment, the way the fingers bend into the wall like they have no weight of their own. Eve staggers to her feet above him; she’s yelling too now. She tries to help Bond up as the medics arrive, and they expected this, but not this. She pulls him up and shoves the medic that approaches her. 

“007, you need to see this,” she says, eyes flickering between him and Q. She’s trying not to look. “C’mon, this isn’t over yet.”

The screams don’t ever end, not as Eve drags him out a back stairwell and onto a cold trail of retreating men.

If he had known it was the last time he’d ever hear from Q, he might have stayed. If he had thought that it was his face that might have pushed him over the edge, he might have never returned. 

 

 

“It’s lovely here,” Eve says. What she means to say with her looks and the stiff posture, unwilling to touch anything, is that it’s a memoriam. 

Bond doesn’t answer. He’s not invited her, and all he can stare at is her lovely neck, and the scar there at its base. 

“You’re planning to bring him here then, yeah?” She asks, not any one tone in her voice. She’s seen him too, after all. 

Bond laughs, the kind that burns right down in the stomach. “Of course not,” he says, and he hurts. Everywhere. Not just in his gut. “How could I?” He has to sit down, he’s laughing so hard. 

“You could come home. Back to MI6 – “

“I can go nowhere.” He says, laughter dying out. 

Eve doesn’t look put out; she looks angry, and Bond hates her. He really does. She could have been there first, she could go and see him now. 

“You know, I think he would hate it here anyway.” She leaves him. He’s sure he’ll never see her again. 

 

 

Bond drives his car. Parks it. Walks down a little footpath into a garden. He won’t touch, or sit close to him. He’ll sit behind him, where he can’t see him, and his face will be forgotten.


End file.
